It's hard to understand the privilege bubble you're in unless you actively try to live like your users. My read of the current trend [1] is that building for your marginal users isn't prioritized culturally in orgs or within engineering. Unseating those ways of working in my experience has been immensely challenging, even when everyone can agree on methodologies to put users first in theory [2].
Thank you so much for the write up! I've been avoiding processes for some reason while I've been learning Elixir and this post pushed me to play with it today. And I started in Erlang and then managed to translate it to Elixir successfully!
I ran into this issue and I'm not sure if it's just a me thing.
When sending the message from the Pong REPL, the following didn't work for me:
I'm confused. Datastar is a free open source framework that you can choose to use or not.
It's weird to call them out as indecent and deceitful for not actively marketing features that they really don't think you need. Even when you think you need it, they've actively encouraged people to analyze their problems to identify if it's a real need or a gap in hypermedia fundamentals knowledge.
Also, the top nav has a Pro page that has what you're looking for.
If an enterprise won't want to pay for the product, what makes you think they're more likely pay for support?
If you're implying they'll only pay when they've seen the value of the product, then the non-pro part of the framework is incredibly feature-rich and can easily do that.
Yeah support model for a lit of projects like this doesn't work. Even companies like the one behind NATS struggle. It's almost contingent on you building a bad product that needs support.
Not a scam. It just feels the same as a scam feels.
One time I had a couch delivered. Two guys show up to set it up. One guy says he needs a tool from the truck and walks off, and the other guy starts talking to our dog, and tells us how he used to train pit bulls, and starts doing some weird hand motions and yelling commands to our dog like he’s casting a spell or something.
I think the guy was probably just not all there mentally, like too much former drug use or something. But it was one of those surreal moments where red flags were going off in my head. I went to find the other guy just to make sure he wasn’t robbing us out the back. Because that’s what it felt like: misdirection, social engineering, a performance.
In hindsight, I don’t think there was anything suspicious going on. But the alarm bells in my head were still completely real.
When we see this “everything is an plugin” but “plugin details are internal-only” and “plugin detail is coming” and “1.0 is released” and “but we will have 40 more release candidates before 1.0 final” and “you could support us with pro” and “you dont need pro” and “we don’t recommend pro” and “you can build anything in pro yourself anyway” and “you shouldn’t use this pro feature anyway and should use CSS instead”, and then when people ask a question about any of this inconsistency, we get juvenile responses like “don’t use it then”, “don’t buy it then”, “fork it then”, “my time isn’t free”, and so on. Even though there is no scam, it’s surreal. Like, “is this really happening?” It sets off the same red flags in people’s minds, even when there is no scam.
Datastar seems very cool as a tool, and the developers seem very technically competent. The problems they face don’t seem to be technical problems.
not the OP, but a lot of the referenced functionality looks like I might use it. The problem is I'm not going to bother trying this and investing any effort with even the looming possibility I'll need to pay to keep going. I don't think too many people approach this space with a purchase evaluation mindset like say, "I'm going to test out this grid to see if we should buy it". In that case pay-for advanced functionality is part of the approach from the start.
Also, I can't see this approach working. Getting enterprise adoption of a front end framework is almost impossible outside of React, let alone paying for a niche one, and the "contact us" approach is a non-starter.
If the core of the framework fits what you need, you could write those additional plugins yourself, rather than relying on the official "pro" ones. My understanding so far is the plugin architecture is intentionally designed for this usecase, so you aren't beholden to the official maintainers to add/tweak features for your specific usecase.
This makes the investment in the tool a lot safer, because you can always swap out pieces that don't fit your usecase, rather than start from scratch with a new framework.
In an enterprise setting, I don't believe the cost alone will be the factor that drives the decision. It'd be weighing up the value of the framework (e.g., UI framework/programming language agnostic stack, simpler architectures, delivery speed, performance, cost of using the framework on users) against the license cost.
> Getting enterprise adoption of a front end framework is almost impossible outside of React, let alone paying for a niche one, and the "contact us" approach is a non-starter.
Two questions on this:
1. Why do you think it's impossible to get org buy-in?
2. Why do those same orgs pick frameworks like Next.js, whose full benefits can only be realized with sophisticated and paid infrastructure?
as i've said in many comments and the devs say ad-nauseum, there's very little need for anything in the Pro license. the fully open-source library is sufficient for almost all needs. And it is easily extendable with plugins if you want more functionality than it provides.
Simple features? Making those imperative APIs declarative is not very simple for me, but you're welcome to not use those features and write them yourself.
A couple of things on the Phoenix point:
- Requires the adoption of Elixir and Datastar is backend agnostic
- Adopting Phoenix feels more suited to greenfield projects, but Datastar is suited for that and brownfield ones.
- Websockets vs Server Sent Events has been really interesting and nuanced
I don't think that's a fair read of their intentions given how they talk about it everywhere [1]. Pro isn't there to paywall great features, but there to support the development of complex and annoying ones. The example of `data-on-signal-patch` that moved from pro to core speaks to how they're thinking about the project.
[1] https://infrequently.org/2025/11/performance-inequality-gap-... [2] https://crukorg.github.io/engineering-guidebook/docs/fronten...